


Oh, you look so free.

by ConvenientAlias



Category: The Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Angst, F/F, Jealousy, Pining, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-30
Updated: 2019-04-30
Packaged: 2020-02-10 05:11:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18653581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ConvenientAlias/pseuds/ConvenientAlias
Summary: Irene can't help but be jealous sometimes. Attolia is not Eddis.





	Oh, you look so free.

Whenever Irene hears stories about the princess of Eddis, she always feels jealous. Helen can ride a pony. Helen can train as a fighter. Helen can go where she pleases, trips all around the country. Helen can do whatever she likes. Irene is always kept cooped up in the palace. Helen is the daughter of a king with male heirs, a princess treated like a little prince, but Irene is her father’s only child, and she is very much a princess, and Attolia is not like Eddis.

Someday she will be a queen, and Helen never will. But Irene wishes she could go riding in the mountains, even if it would be a very goatfoot thing to do.

She’s sure she’ll hate Helen if they ever meet. She doesn’t even particularly want to (it seems petty), but she’s sure she will. How can she not, when Helen gets to live such a life, when she gets everything Irene could ever want? Besides, the stories say she’s blunt and loud and full of the joy of youth, and not at all like a noble girl should be. Irene will hate her, she knows she will.

Helen comes to the feast given to celebrate Irene’s engagement. Irene is fourteen and Helen is eleven. But Helen acts like a child—like a boy, even—and Irene is a lady already.

Acting like a boy, she asks if she can kiss Irene’s hand.

Irene’s father gives her an amused look. There is no polite way to refuse, even if it is ridiculous child’s play and impudence and makes her look as foolish as Helen. So she gives Helen her hand, and Helen holds it and kisses it. Her hands are rough from sword training. Her lips are chapped from traveling through the mountains.

She smiles merrily. Irene feels the amusement of the whole room, weighing on her shoulders rather than Helen's, and she hates her.

* * *

A year later she gets married, and kills her husband the same night. Over the next year she kills tens of men and women, culling nobility and commonfolk alike, anyone who challenges her rule. Anyone who sees her as a girl, a child, a target.

In Eddis, they say Helen still goes riding. She no longer trains as much in weaponry; it is not entirely proper, after all, and she is getting older. But she still goes hunting in the woods. Irene walls herself up in her castle. Her guard will protect her. She will weather this out, somehow.

* * *

When she hears Helen’s brothers are dead, she wonders at how fate turns and changes everything.

When she hears Helen will be crowned, she decides to leave Attolia for the first time since becoming queen.

It is proper for her to be at the event. Sounis, Relius says, will be there too. And Attolia is stable enough that she can leave for a couple weeks—Teleus will leave men he can trust in charge, though he himself must travel with her and keep her safe. If the country somehow turns upside-down while she’s gone, she’ll take it back if she has to slaughter another hundred men to do so.

Because she will go to this coronation; she must go. She wants to see what kind of queen a spoiled, rough-shod girl like Helen will make, how the crown will fit on her head, how she will sit on a throne.

Helen has changed, but she has not softened. Her broken nose makes her face crooked and mannish, and the years have built up muscles in her arms and body. She is still young, and she still wears youth like a boy rather than a young woman. She does not bow to Attolia anymore, or kiss her hand, but only nods politely, and Attolia nods back. To do any more is to shift the balance of power, and neither of them is willing.

Eddisian ceremonies are more archaic than Attolian ones. The coronation is briefer and simpler than Attolia’s coronation was. This makes Attolia feel bitter too—she had to jump through hoops to get a crown on her head, but Helen barely has to say more than a few words, and there are no men shot or poisoned over dinner. It is all very easy.

Certain it cannot continue to be this easy, she takes Helen aside and tells her how it is, truthfully. Warns her: not everything in life comes on a silver platter. Being a queen is not like being a little prince.

Helen listens. She has a decent poker face, for all it is crooked and mannish. The only sign of her shock is slightly widened eyes. When Attolia is done giving her advice (and it’s good advice, it’s solid advice, it’s more charity than Attolia ought to give a foolish child like this one), she thanks Irene politely, as if this is just one more gift from a foreign dignitary, like one of the casks of wine Sounis brought for the banquet. Attolia knows she won’t listen.

For months, she waits to hear of assassinations and rebellion. Nothing of the sort occurs. Eddis is not Attolia.

But in Attolia, there are more baron plots, and Relius has new reports for her every night, new situations arising every day. In the year after Eddis’ coronation, Attolia has to execute ten men for treason. Eddis doesn’t have to execute any.

* * *

Attolia wishes she were the queen of Eddis. Eddis has her mountains; Eddis has her Thief. Eddis has a court that actually likes her. Eddis can ride her pony whenever she wants.

But Attolia is Attolia—it is written even into her name now. She knows, really, she could never be a queen of Eddis. She is steel hiding in silk; neither Eddis’ coarseness nor its softness would ever suit.

* * *

Monarchs do not visit each other often, but Eddis visits Attolia once more, in the years before the war, before everything changes irrevocably. Attolia knows of her visit only a few weeks in advance, and she has to clean up house incredibly quickly, get both her castle and her court in order and presentable. There’s been a revolt fomenting for the past several months, and Relius has been quietly regulating it, but they can’t chance it breaking forth while a foreign ruler is in the country. That would lose face. Attolia acts swiftly. She only has to kill two men and a woman to make this one die down, and she doesn’t even have to prolong their deaths that much. When Eddis arrives, there are no bodies left hanging off walls or sitting in cages.

Only rumors stirring of what she has done. Those, she knows, have traveled to Eddis’ ears. She is not comfortable in Attolia’s presence; she is wary, as she was not even at her coronation. Attolia wants to say she’s learned wariness in her queenship but she suspects it’s just that she’s heard more and more about Attolia’s atrocities, and has lost any vestige of trust in her.

_Then why did she come? She could have stayed away._ Attolia does not ask her. The visit is good for diplomatic relations, and it solidifies Attolia’s authority over her own country that she has Eddis as an ally. Though she knows Eddis would never support her in the case of a coup or a revolution, there are some in the country that believe she would, and Attolia will do anything to keep up the illusion.

She has festivities to celebrate Eddis’ visit. Eddis does not dance much, and when she does, her steps are stiff and unpracticed. Eddisian and Attolian dances are different, and they say Eddis is a bad dancer even in her homeland. But the men she dances with all smile at her and she smiles back and they are utterly charmed—worse, her smiles seem to be sincere even though most of the men she dances with are vipers. Attolia watches and fumes. So much for diplomatic relations; at this rate, Eddis is establishing good relations with Erondites.

She herself dances with every notable nobleman, though all of their smiles to her are incredibly fake, frozen and frightened. But she is a good dancer, no one can argue with that. She notices Eddis watching her from the edge of the hall, and wonders if Eddis will take her womanly grace for weakness, submissiveness. But at least when Eddis watches her, she is not plotting against her with any of the barons. Attolia dances as skillfully as she can. The gods know her dancing will not save her country, nor will it ever make Eddis trust or like her, but at least it can hold Eddis’ attention.

Eddis does not dance very much, but she joins with some of the men for sparring matches. She is not as good as most of them, not having been in consistent training for a couple years, but at least her stance is good. She jokes with the men, and a couple even laugh with her.

Even Teleus never laughs with Attolia. She watches from the sidelines—she is a good hostess, will not abandon her guest—quietly and solemnly. Yes, Eddis has a good stance. Her arms are too thick for a proper noblewoman; she has never learned, will never learn. Attolia finds herself starting to spread her legs and reach out her arms as if to hold a sword, mimicking. She pulls her legs back together and her arms back to her sides before anyone notices.

* * *

Eddis only meets with Attolia in private briefly, and even then it’s barely private. Two guards stand by the door, one Eddisian, one Attolian. They don’t trust the queens not to kill each other—the Attolian knows the world is full of danger, and the Eddisian knows never to trust an Attolian.

“It has been quite a while,” Eddis says, as if they have not spoken to each other the entire visit.

“So it has,” Attolia agrees.

“I should thank you for your kindness when I was crowned, and your counsel,” Eddis says. “I have not had any trouble.”

The thanks is mockery. Attolia fights her own body—she will not let blood rise to her face, she will not show her embarrassment. Acting as if Eddis were Attolia. She was a fool; they will never be anything like the same. Eddis will always be lucky, and Attolia will always be fighting. And she was a fool, but she accepts Eddis’ thanks.

Eddis smiles at Attolia, but it is not the smile of the child who once kissed her hand. It is not even the smile she offers every spare member of Attolia’s court. It is not a real smile at all, but something careful, wary. Like her guard, she knows never to trust Attolia. She tells Attolia she may return the visit and come to Eddis anytime, and Attolia says she will consider the invitation, and they both know it will not come to pass.

Before she leaves, Attolia does something impulsive. She does not kiss Eddis’s hand, but she embraces her and kisses her on each cheek. It is a gesture of friendship, not submission. It is, for diplomatic purposes, acceptable.

Eddis is frozen under her lips, and she knows it is not her place to do this—they are not friends. Well, let her think of it what she will. She is far too afraid of Attolia to realize the truth of Attolia’s pitiful longings.

* * *

For weeks after Eddis’s departure, Attolia dreams of having a swordswoman at her back. She dreams of Eddis’ arms around her. She dreams of being one of the men lucky enough to dance with her.

Then one night it becomes a nightmare, and she dreams of Eddis’s sword through her gut, Eddis’s eyes on her cold and wary. It is only a nightmare, but it is more realistic than the other dreams. So Attolia knows she must forget Eddis altogether—personally, of course; politically she must always keep an eye on her, because if she lets down her guard for an instant, all her nightmares will come true.

Attolia is not Eddis; it is not secure and safe. One must always be careful.

**Author's Note:**

> This was gonna be a fic about Eddis and Attolia hooking up but um it's not I guess, so. I hope you had fun with this 2k words of basically no dialogue and a lot of canon-compliant-ish backstory.  
> Title is because for some reason "Hunger" by Florence and the Machine is stuck in my head today. I think it's a decent song for this fic, though not exactly on point? But it's still kind of the mood.  
> I'd love to hear from you in the comments! Or come chill on tumblr with me at convenientalias.tumblr.com


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